Monday, November 26, 2012

Twitter is not a charity

It is true that I have pointed out some shortcomings in Twitter's monetization strategy, but that is a very long way from damning the entire enterprise as somehow abandoning its roots to become an extractive system.

Yes, Twitter has strong incentives to show returns on the billion dollars of investment that it has already absorbed, but that was its purpose in the first place. No more than any other for-profit startup, Twitter was always intended to generate returns. Now most business plans begin with a business model, while Twitte's turning that equation on its head has left it to scramble late in the day to find sufficient revenue streams to show IPO-worthy value. For most enterprises this would be a terminal condition, but as Twitter is demonstrably effective at communicating brand messaging, perhaps it will yet prove an exception.

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